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In a world sometimes tired of contemplating its own treasures, a plethora of discography with immediate and commonplace access can make the release of a new recording dedicated to some of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas surprising. More particularly, the choice made by an artist such as Philippe Entremont, after 70 years of a phenomenal career, to focus on one of the Viennese Master’s most recorded parts, reflects the complexity and intensity governing the relationship between the performer and the work, the relationship between his instrument and the orchestral aspects of the writing. This year, the exceptional artist celebrates two anniversaries. 70 years on the international stage and his 85th birthday.

The few sonatas on this CD, milestones in Beethoven’s oeuvre, are just a short list for the audience. For the very choice of the works testifies to a passionate commitment, a gourmet and jubilant approach to do justice, with style and elegance, to a long journey initiated in 1957, during a recording made at Pathé, nowhere to be found.

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Albena Petrovic Vratchanska is a Luxembourgish composer of Bulgarian origin and a Knight of The Order of Merit of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg – L’Ordre de Mérite du Grand-Duchéde Luxembourg ( 2013). She is honored also with the Médaille de Mérite en Argent de l’Union Grand Duc Adolphe (2017), Médaille en Argent de l’Union Saint Pie X (2018) and the «Cultural Award 2007» from the municipality of Hesperange. Many of her compositions are performed also outside Luxembourg – in Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, Bulgaria, Poland, Greece, USA, Singapore, Russia, Spain, Andorra, Brazil, Slovakia, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Kosovo, Switzerland, Denmark, Serbia, Austria, Australia, Portugal, Croatia. Albena Petrovic is President/Founder of the International Composition Competition “Artistes en Herbe” (“Budding Artists”) under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture of Luxembourg.

Véronique Nosbaum is a very special personality in Luxembourg vocal scenery. She is one of those naturally involved in many kinds of art creation – contemporary art, theatre, literature, music. Romain Nosbaum is an individualist among the pianists of his generation. Without airs and graces, but with modesty and passionate devotion, he is solely focused on music. Both the grand gesture and sheer brilliancy are not his main focus – instead, his playing stands out through intelligence, subtle individuality and technical perfection.

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Brahms’s complete sonatas for piano and violin (Op. 78, 100, 108 and Scherzo from the F.A.E Sonata) are the monumental works that inspire and intrigue chamber musicians as well as classical music audiophiles. With a fresh view of these important pieces, this recording puts the composer first, allowing the protagonist to meet the composer’s requirements for the scores. With differentiated phrasing and tempi, Darvarova & Chen rediscover Brahms’ violin sonatas in a completely different and new way.

GRAMMY®-nominated, award-winning (Gold Medal at the Global Music Awards in 2017 and 2018) and a concert violinist since the age of four, Elmira Darvarova caused a sensation, becoming the first ever (and so far only) woman-concertmaster in the history of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. As MET concertmaster, she has performed with the greatest conductors of our time, including the legendary Carlos Kleiber. Hailed as “brilliant” by Fanfare Magazine, multi-award winning pianist-composer Zhen Chen has performed as a soloist and chamber music artist at prominent music venues in USA and China, such as Stern Auditorium, Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall, David Geffen Hall of Lincoln Center, and China National Centre for Performing Arts.

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For some years now, Hamburg has been reinventing itself as a city of music. The recently opened Elbphilharmonie – the spectacular concert house on the river Elbe – is one of the factors in this development. As is the KomponistenQuartier (composersʼ quarter) in the Neustadt district between Rödingsmarkt and St. Pauli, with no fewer than half a dozen small museums dedicated to composers such as Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler. All of these composers feature on this present Hamburg album, as well as a number of composers, male and female, who all wrote noteworthy miniatures for voice and piano.

Mariana Popova was responsible for bringing together these 28 compositions and merging them into a dramatic entity – compositions that together result in a very personal, stylistically multi-facetted Hamburg album (including many worldwide first performances). This is a Hamburg album by two women who have chosen Hamburg as their home: Chinese-born Lini Gong and Bulgarian-born Mariana Popova both feel a close bond with the musical life and musical history of Hamburg. As the duo explain: “We consciously bring together musical languages from three centuries and play about with contrasts and with tone colours, in fact with the entire rich spectrum of the art song genre – a genre that we love very much.”

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Trumpet and organ has us immediately thinking of trumpet tunes and trumpet voluntaries, of majestic, bombastic music by Henry Purcell and George Frideric Handel, of mixtures and reed stops that resound so strongly as to make church walls tremble. The music on this CD does not adhere to those stereotypes: it is very delicate, light, transparent, elegant. If one was to pigeon-hole it, the choice of genre would be difficult. From a musical point of view, it is located between the Baroque and the Classical eras, a period whose various art forms are given numerous labels: early Classical, sensitive style, Rococo, Sturm und Drang. In addition to numerous performances as a soloist and chamber musician, Immanuel Richter is also principal trumpet player of the Sinfonieorchester Basel. Together with Hans Jürg Bättig on the organ, the trumpeter has slowly approached the works of this CD, often playing them in concerts in order to become completely familiar with the music. There is no instrument in his eyes that fits the trumpet better than the organ. The timbres merge into each other and complement each other wonderfully.